Pabst City got killed today by the City of Milwaukee Common Council. This is actually good news. You might think that given my love for this city, and my love for beer I might be for it. I would be, if they hadn’t asked for my money when they came up with the plan.
Here’s the ambitious details from the investors and developers. Read it while you can.
If independent investors want to go ahead and build it, fine, I just don’t think they need city money to do so. That comes out of your property tax bill, city dwellers. That comes out of your bar tab when you have a beer in the city (the bar owner pays property taxes), your friend’s or family’s rent payments, and your grocery bill if you buy food in the city.It’s in a toxic neighborhood, overlooking two jails, a freeway that will be under construction forever, and the coroner’s office. There’s plenty of reasons to develop along the Park East corridor, they tore it down for a reason, and now people want tax dollars to go to this waste site with it’s incredible view of the city’s rotting dead, imprisoned, and stalled traffic?
Given it’s neighborhood, the condos in it would most certainly have been government subsidized housing in a few years. Does downtown really need more condos? In the most blighted part of downtown as well, with virtually no access to food or convenience?
Do we really need another entertainment district? Look at the failure of the Milwaukee Theatre just two blocks away. Milwaukee, Brady and Water Streets as well as North Avenue are all thriving, with room to grow.
Spending taxpayer money on this is as smart as putting our casino in the middle of a hazardous waste field with half the populace unable to tell the other half how to get there. And that’s just the locals.
Wait, we did that already.
This was just a bad idea from the start. I’m not against the development of downtown, nor am I opposed to this project given private funding, but having to include city tax money (and remember where the bulk of that comes from) is just a bad idea.
If Johnny Vassalo and Joe Bartolotta and the rest of the city’s successful entrepreneur’s want to gather private funding and put it together, I’ll be the first one there to crack a champagne bottle over the bow of this vessel.
This idea of public funding was just so bad the conservatives like Belling, Wagner and Sykes were obviously opposed to it, but even the liberal rag flagship The Shepard Express was also opposed to it.
That’s all for now.

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